


He Is (Not) Risen

by stepantrofimovic



Series: Opera fanfic [4]
Category: Parsifal - Wagner
Genre: Depression, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, aren't these characters even searchable, pain is not cured in a day, surprisingly little christian imagery all things considered, this is like having to create a tannhauser tag again, wounds as a metaphor for depression specifically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:15:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23655208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepantrofimovic/pseuds/stepantrofimovic
Summary: Two conversations at Amfortas' bedside, years apart.
Relationships: Parsifal/Amfortas
Series: Opera fanfic [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1688206
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	1. Act I

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: this fic, especially the second chapter, deals extensively with suicidal thoughts and feelings.

No one tells the boy where to go or not to go, not after he’s promised not to hunt any more game on Monsalvat, so when he finds his way to the king’s room, he doesn’t consider that perhaps he’s not meant to be there. The king is lying in bed, and if at first glance he looks like he’s sleeping, he proves the boy wrong very quickly.

“Who’s there?” the king asks, and his voice sounds strained, tearing with pain around the edges.

The boy has no answer to that question, so he stays silent and still. This has worked well in the past.

“Come closer,” the king orders. The boy obeys. “Let me look at you.”

Standing close to the king’s bed is – the boy can feel it again now, the same searing pain he felt in the hall of the Grail, just duller and more muted. The king gasps, struggling to pull himself up to look him in the eye, but the boy quickly drops to his knees next to the bed. He lowers his head, feeling the older man’s authority on him – it awes him, this man who’s hurting so incredibly.

“You are the one who killed the swan.”

The boy shakes his head. “He’s not dead, just wounded.”

The king starts to laugh, but it turns into a pained cough so quickly the boy is scared. From up close, he can see the king’s cheeks are burning with fever, his eyes shining and distant.

“Let me look at you,” the king asks, and his hand seeks the boy’s head. His fingers are calloused and smell like fever and blood, and his touch on the boy’s cheek stings, but he does not pull away.

“Where did you come from?”

He almost says, _I don’t know_ , but that’s one question he knows the answer to. “From the forest.”

“You do look like a creature of the forest,” the king murmurs, gaze distant, as if he forgot the boy was there at all. The boy doesn’t know what that means, but the tone makes him shiver. He doesn’t know what to say, either, so he waits for the king to continue.

The king shakes his head. “You’re more beautiful than that swan anyway.” He draws another ragged breath. With each feverish shiver, the dulled pain seeps deeper and deeper into the boy’s limbs. He finds himself leaning into the king’s touch more and more, longing to do something – anything, just to make this man hurt less. He cannot see the king’s wound, not while he’s covered in luxurious sheets and bandages, but somehow the blood still seeps through them.

He wants to kiss that blood. The realisation leaves him breathless.

The king has seemed to pull away from him, withdrawing into some feverish reverie of his own, but suddenly his eyes focus on the boy again. “You were in the hall of the Grail.” He sounds like he’s just remembered, and the boy remembers too, remembers what he felt in that colossal hall.

“It burned you, that thing – the Grail.”

“It does, always. It keeps burning, now, as well, it never stops.” A pause as the king struggles to catch his breath. “Did it burn you too?”

The boy knows he can’t answer that question, can’t even understand what prompted the king to ask it. He thinks about shaking his head, but a wordless lie is still a lie, and somehow he can’t bring himself to lie to this man. Instead, he asks a question of his own.

“The knights, they still ask you to do it. To uncover the Grail. Why do they ask that, if it pains you so much?”

The king’s face is a mask of distant sadness, like something that he’s contemplated so many times it has lost its edge. “I have failed them all. You can’t – you can’t begin to understand the size of it.” He looks at the boy again, eyes burning. “I haven’t failed you, not yet.”

This, the boy knows the answer to. His voice is steady as he replies, “You won’t fail me.”

The king grimaces and shakes his head. “You are not like them.”

It’s the boy’s turn to sound vehement. “I have seen _them_ reach the heights of ecstasy while you were burning with pain. I don’t want to be like _them_.”

“Is that why you didn’t take communion from the Grail?”

“You did not take it either.”

Once again, the king doesn’t seem to have heard him. “I thought it was… I thought you didn’t want my hands… It doesn’t matter, that’s not why you stepped away. I’m content.” He seems to breathe more easily, as if a weight has been lifted from his chest.

“It’s striking,” he adds, after a pause. “There is… less pain, while you are here. The Grail, it hurts to touch, to be close to, but you… you’re not like that.”

The boy doesn’t know why he should be, but there’s an awed expression on the king’s face and it makes him want to fall silent, to let this man who is so powerful and beautiful and suffering look at him and hold him close.

The king’s voice is small, exhausted, when he next speaks. “Will you stay here?” he asks, and if a king could beg he would be begging, but the boy knows kings cannot do that. “Wait with me?”

The boy doesn’t know what he’s meant to wait for, and he knows he will have to leave soon, that there’s a mission, a destiny waiting for him in a wizard’s castle, but he also knows that he wants to come back to this man, to this room. And, for now, he knows that he can wait – that he can lay his head down on the pillows, and rest his back against the bed, and keep wake next to the wounded king as he slowly falls asleep.


	2. Act III

On Easter Saturday, Amfortas doesn’t rise from his bed. They made him a fresh bed, laid pillows out anew for him on Friday, the whole room now cleaned and aired out and pristine, bearing no sign of the years of agony he lived in here.

But the window is the same, and from the bed he can still see the same tree, now with a few budding branches in the tentative spring. The same tree that was the only thing he saw for the past years. They hung fresh curtains, though. The previous ones were stained with blood.

Amfortas looks down at his chest. It doesn’t even bear a scar. Somehow he hates that more than anything else, that pristine expanse of skin where all he is used to seeing is blood.

He does not get up.

***

He hears quiet steps and hushed voices outside his door more than once before Parsifal finally comes in. Amfortas has known all this time that he was waiting for him, and still his appearance cuts his breath short. Parsifal is dressed in white, still looking so young, even after so many years. He has washed, and his brow seems to shine with a light that lances all the way through to Amfortas’ heart. He remembers seeing this man – a boy, years ago, walk into this same room, and then leave, and he feels a hand grip his chest, squeeze tightly around his ribs.

“You didn’t join us today,” Parsifal says, and the painful grip on Amfortas’ chest does not ease. Parsifal walks all the way to the bed, but doesn’t seem to know what to do from there. Finally, after a long moment of silent hesitation, he perches on the very edge of the mattress. The glance he gives Amfortas is seeking permission, but Amfortas can’t even nod, can barely breathe.

Parsifal’s tunics smell faintly of incense, and Amfortas wonders if he already went to the hall of the Grail today, if he uncovered the chalice without him. The thought sends a jolt of pain through his lungs, and some of it must show on his face, because Parsifal shifts uneasily.

“Have we offended you?” the young man finally says, and Amfortas can only laugh. It comes out as a brief angry bark.

“That is not the question I would ask.”

Parsifal looks hurt by that reply, and Amfortas regrets it immediately. “Then help me ask the right questions,” he retorts, but his voice is so soft and sweet that tears come to Amfortas’ eyes unbidden. He closes his eyes against them.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and his voice sounds tight to his own ears. “I’m – tired.” It comes out hollow, but saying anything else feels – impossible, right now. He wants to turn around, face the wall, but he’s scared that Parsifal will leave.

“I’m sorry. Shall I let you rest?”

And there it is, Parsifal leaving. “No,” Amfortas answers too quickly, too loud. “Please, stay.” _I have asked you this before._

It seems that Parsifal is also remembering the same time, because his expression turns regretful. “I’m here. I’m staying.”

“Thank you. I’m – glad.”

A bit of the old cluelessness, the old abruptness of the pure of heart, is back to Parsifal’s reply. Amfortas wonders briefly where the rest of it went. “You don’t look it. Glad, I mean.”

“My apologies,” Amfortas sighs. “It’s just – different. Not to have to wish for things anymore.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Parsifal seems willing to wait him out, let him speak.

“I just – all these years, I longed for something. I longed for glory, and then I longed for Kundry, and then for a long, long time, I longed for nothing, and then, after you left, I understood what nothing was, so I longed for death.” He pauses. “Now I have nothing again.”

“After I left?”

Amfortas doesn’t answer, just turns his face away. His expression is so pained that it reminds Parsifal of when the wound was still there.

“I came back.” The words taste like ash on Parsifal’s own tongue.

Amfortas starts at that, lifting himself up on the pillow to turn towards him, eyes blazing. “It took years!”

Parsifal leans back at that, surprised and defensive. “I did all I could! I –”

Amfortas’ face contorts in pain again. “I know, I’m sorry, you’re not – it’s not your fault. I don’t _want_ to make it your fault, I just –” His breathing is ragged, eyes brimming with tears. He presses his face into the pillows.

His words are muffled, and Parsifal can’t hear what comes next, so he’s forced – or perhaps allowed – to lean closer again.

“It hurt, it just hurt, so much, all the time,” Amfortas mumbles into the pillows, and suddenly Parsifal can hear the tears in his beloved’s harsh breaths.

“I know, the wound, I –” he reaches out to hold Amfortas, if only by the shoulders. Amfortas covers Parsifal’s hand with his own and holds on, desperately, fingers digging down, seeking purchase.

“It still hurts,” he gasps, and Parsifal freezes in fear.

“The wound? Are you not healed? I shall seek –” he makes as if to rise.

Amfortas shakes his head, pulling him back towards the bed. “Not that. I –” he falters, hiding his face again, for he can’t bear to look at Parsifal as he says what comes next. “I have wanted to be dead for so long.”

Parsifal’s intake of breath is loud enough to fill the room. Amfortas waits for him to say anything, to do anything but tremble, minute shakes that Amfortas can feel where their hands are touching.

“Will you please lie down with me?” He has nothing left to ask after this.

Parsifal is already barefoot, he notices as he climbs into bed. The boy could lie next to him in any way, but he chooses to all but plaster himself to his side, his head nestled against Amfortas’ shoulder. It helps, somehow, that he doesn’t have to look at him.

“You were here for such a brief time, and you – you brought so much solace, you brought _me_ solace, it was like I could – live again somehow. And then – it hurt so much more after that, for a while, and then it stopped mattering.”

“Is that when you stopped uncovering the Grail for the others?”

Amfortas nods, and his face takes on a different shade of suffering, one that Parsifal suspect comes from thinking of his father. But they don’t talk about Titurel, not yet.

“You will do it now,” Amfortas says, finally. “Uncover the Grail, head the knights.”

“With you,” Parsifal exclaims, suddenly vehement. “Only with you. Please.”

Amfortas closes his eyes, letting his head fall back against the pillows. Parsifal draws even closer to him then, resting his own cheek on Amfortas’ chest ( _clean, unbloodied, unscarred, blessed_ ). He longs to caress him, but he doesn’t know if he can.

The pause is very long before Amfortas replies, “I don’t know if I have the strength.”

“It will not hurt,” Parsifal assures him.

He can feel Amfortas shudder under him. “You don’t know – you have _no idea_ how much it hurt.”

“I _felt_ it. When I was with you, in the hall of the Grail. I felt it.”

Amfortas opens his eyes again, staring down at him, startled. “You didn’t – enlightened by _compassion_. Oh, Lord.” Suddenly he’s wrapping his arms tightly around Parsifal, shaking. “I didn’t realise – oh God, child, I’m so sorry.”

Parsifal smiles up at him, because being in Amfortas’ arms feels so right, so perfect. “I’m not a child. Haven’t been in a long time.” The words are a rebuke, but his tone and gaze are as soft as he can make them, and Amfortas understands.

Still, his eyes are filled with tears of regret. “I did fail you, after all. I failed you in so many ways.”

“You _saved_ me.” Parsifal turns this time, leaning on his elbows, gazing down at Amfortas, and suddenly their faces are so close he can see every detail of his beard, and he is filled with a burning longing that is unlike the searing pain of the Grail in all possible ways.

He longs to come closer, so he does. His nose is brushing Amfortas’, who looks frozen in place – capable of nothing but looking up at him in awe. “When I was in Klingsor’s castle – when I was with Kundry. She kissed me, but I felt you. It was your pain that saved me then. It was the thought of you that saved me every day since.”

Amfortas is barely breathing. “I don’t – I don’t understand how.”

Parsifal closes the distance between them, and as Amfortas’ lips part softly under his, he knows how, as he has never doubted he did.

***

On Easter Sunday, Amfortas gets up for Mass, and then goes back to bed in the middle of the day. He stands next to Parsifal as he uncovers the Grail, grits his teeth against the pain that is not there and yet so clearly remembered, and then he crawls back to his room, exhausted, barely able to stand.

On Easter Sunday, Parsifal joins him in bed as soon as he can leave the Knights alone. They lie there, and sleep, and when Amfortas wakes up for the third time in who knows how many hours Parsifal tells him about a song he composed while he was sleeping, a song that sounds like birds singing more than any human form of art. Then Parsifal kisses him, and tells him they could go out in the garden tomorrow, if he wants to, that Easter Monday is a day for spring and flowers blossoming and for time wasted joyfully together. Amfortas listens, and for the first time in years, he doesn’t feel dread.

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I have seen the Met's _Parsifal_ , yes this is about Peter Mattei again. Also, at some point the Met's online programme will end and I'll go back to posting fanfic for fandoms literally anyone else but me is in, but apparently we're not there yet.


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